To develop plans for making the NCTE Annual Convention a safe and welcoming place for lesbians and gay men to be out and at ease in their identities; to initiate, sustain, and provide a space for a conversation about the relevance of gendered, sexual and affectional identities to reading and writing lives, to teaching lives, and to the well-being of students; to promote inquiry into issues of sexuality and identity in the teaching of literacy and literature, to encourage proposals for presentation of such inquiry through public meetings such as the annual convention, and to support individuals in the production of publishable written reports of such inquiry; to move away from post-hoc preparation of sessions toward a program that is selected completely from sessions proposed by the deadline through the regular process; and to select excellent proposals for inclusion in the LGBT strand for annual convention.